THE LIVING MUSEUM...THAT'S DYING

Calusa Nature Center & Planetarium may be on the verge of shutting down
THE REGION'S MOST VENERABLE VENUE of the verdant — the proud Calusa Nature Center and Planetarium, a 105-acre living museum of the subtropics in Fort Myers — is teetering

Bald eagles, mating butterflies, friendly baby gators, butterfly gardens and hawks beautify Calusa Nature Center.

on the brink of extinction. Its slice-of-universe splendor stretches from cypress swamps to shadowy captive rattlesnakes to celestial sun storms, and from the native caracara to the moon Callisto. Jupiter's famous satellite can seen by telescope from the Nature Center's Planetarium, the only one of its kind between Tampa and Fort Lauderdale, and possibly the only place in the Western world where a visitor can look deeply and clearly into the universe while standing about 50 feet from a 12-foot American alligator singularly unconcerned with life beyond the edges of the gator hole.

"This is the worst financial crisis we've ever faced, and I don't know what's going to happen," said Ralph Williams, president of the board of trustees for the private, nonprofit institution. The Nature Center holds a lease on its city-owned property good until the year 2095, paying a negligible amount for the privilege.

RADDATZ/ FLORIDA WEEKLY

Mr. Williams, however, admits to no instrument or telescopic tool that will let him look clearly into the next 12 months at the center, let alone the next 86 years.

The place will celebrate its 40th anniversary beginning in January — if its doors are open to do so.

The only things standing between a potentially significant reduction in circumstances — perhaps with little or no paid staff and extended periods of closure — are money and volunteer time. Your money and time, say the Nature Center's promoters, who prove as diverse a bunch, themselves, as the flora and fauna they have exposed to generations of Southwest Floridians and visitors.

They range from the regionally famous — Bill Hammond, a professor emeritus at FGCU who helped found the place, Syd Kitson, the force behind the Babcock Ranch planned community, or Mary Lee Mann, wife of Lee County Commissioner Frank Mann, to name only a few — to the brilliantly dedicated.

All of them are asking residents and visitors alike to help. And that's not hard to do.

"I would say to your readers: just come," says Kim Pierce, the director of operations and a Sunshine State native. A five-year veteran, she arrived first as a naturalist in 2004, with undergraduate degrees in forest ecology and public policy from the University of Michigan, and significant time working in other nature centers and in the Everglades. Now she's a graduate student in environmental sciences at Florida Gulf Coast University.

Along with the science of creation, she's also learned the art of candor.

"Our financial situation, for me, is the shadow on the landscape," she said last week, standing in the screened and sun-spangled butterfly garden while surrounded by winged confections of color, airborne and aflutter. "I don't think it's any one person's fault that this has happened — maybe just a general lack of focus on the severity of the problem.

"Should we save this place? When I think about other places, I don't think this has any competition in Southwest Florida. There's no other parcel like it that shows what Florida was, surrounded by development. But there's no purpose in saving a place, unless people love it."

She'd been trying to talk about what she loved in the Calusa Nature Center — and that wasn't difficult for her.

Once, the full-time staff numbered 12. When she arrived, that number was eight, and now it's down to four remarkable people. "But one thing I love is how dedicated this staff is here, and how much they know," Ms. Pierce explained. "Sometimes when I ask Carole (Holmberg, the astrophysics wiz and director of the planetarium) a question about the universe, the answer is so good it hurts."

Ms. Pierce loves that kind of pain.

Dreams — the sense of something that could happen but probably won't because money is limited — probably cause another kind of pain.

"I guess if I have to pick my own favorite creatures, it's the big cats," says Scott Gregory, the director of animal care whose affable cheer in all weathers and to all people is complimented by his eloquence and passion for all his animals, and his exceptional knowledge, obtained through the highly regarded Sante Fe College Teaching Zoo in Gainesville.

The Nature Center has a bobcat, pound-for-pound probably the fiercest cat in the animal kingdom, but Mr. Gregory would like someday to celebrate the Florida panther with a live animal.

"Getting one would be no problem, a dream come true," he says. "I can get a cat for free. But the enclosure alone would take $150,000 to $200,000, with a 12-foot-high fence and a 4-foot overlay fence on top of it, and shift doors, and concrete and an indoor area for bad weather and hurricanes."

For Mary Lee Mann, who carted the Nature Center around in her car trunk to Lee County schools when it was a "suitcase museum," as she calls it — and served for years, either leading the board or sitting on it — the current dilemma may be just a bump in the road.

ERIC RADDATZ/ FLORIDA WEEKLY Darrell and Theresa Nicholson, visiting from Caribou, Maine, get instruction from educational naturalist Alexander Hodson in the butterfly gardens, above, and petting zoo, left, at the Calusa Nature Center & Planetarium.

"It took a lot of people a lot of years and a lot of false starts and sidesteps to get the Calusa Nature Center going," she explains. "It's a feature that our community needs. Where else can you go within 15 minutes of downtown Fort Myers and see what Florida is really like? That's something we need to provide — both for ourselves and our quality of life, and for our children and grandchildren. The interpretive building with its exhibits and interactive displays, the classes, the summer camps — for some kids this is the most nature they'll ever be involved in."

The money train

The nature and fun, for a mere pinch of the American greenback, is all located near the corner of Colonial Boulevard and Ortiz Avenue on the south side of a golf course — across the street from a Wal-Mart Supercenter — over what was once the city's well field, into which water was pumped and filtered through to the aquifer.

PIERCE

Starting now and through the end of the year, for example, you can buy a $40 annual family membership that lets you and yours come in and use the place like you own it — anytime it's open, he notes.

From the new Insectarium to the 1,000-gallon touch tank of sea and shell fish; from the reptiles and amphibians inside to a variety of animals who live outside in large cages; and from one end of the several trail miles winding through the Nature Center to the other — where it's still possible to spot every kind of Florida hawk, along with skunks, bobcats, hawks, river otters, alligators, raccoons, opossums, a variety of snakes and gray foxes — the place defies its shaky financial legs. At least in appearance, since it seems robust.

Mr. Williams (no relation to the reporter) is a master of understatement, perhaps, when he calls that $40 family membership deal — not previously advertised and designed to help celebrate the 40th anniversary — "a cheap date, and a great Hanukkah or Christmas present."

But there is pressing need in the offer, since the bills during this month alone, when the traditionally popular haunted walk will take place before Halloween (one scary walk for those who love spooks, and one designed to scare no one, for the little kids), might amount to about $20,000.

In any average month they amount to between $3,000 and $5,000 "to keep the animals fed and the staff paid, and things like that," Mr. Williams says, adding this alarming note: "We always operate in the red, and at one point recently, the center was down to something like $87 in reserves."

Among other financial setbacks was the failure of a highly publicized $150 per ticket event with the famous wildlife expert Jack Hanna to bring in a windfall that might carry the center through the year — but it didn't happen. "So when May came, we expected to have about $100,000, but we only had about $14,000," Mr. Williams said.

Each year, he noted, "an angel has come forward to save us. But that hasn't happened in 2009."

GREGORY

So now it's hand-to-mouth.

"The haunted walk will give us funds, and if that's successful we can get into the holiday of lights, and that would give us a cushion going into spring," Mr. Williams conjectured. "We don't know what we'll do then."

Begging, for one thing.

"If we were just to let the economy hit us, and we reduced the staff and hours or just closed, a lot of people would be bummed out if they didn't know, and didn't have a chance to help. So we're asking everybody — just come to the haunted house. Or give us $40 if you can, for a family membership. Or just come buy one ticket."

And if you're in a position to underwrite the Calusa Nature Center for a few years, you could do that, too.